Real-time restoration of images degraded by uniform motion blur in foveal active vision systems

Foveated, log-polar, or space-variant image architectures provide a high resolution and wide field workspace, while providing a small pixel computation load. These characteristics are ideal for mobile robotic and active vision applications, but have been little used due to the general lack of image processing tools that are applicable to the log-polar coordinate system. Recently, we have described a generalization of the Fourier transform (the fast exponential chirp transform), which allows frame-rate computation of full-field two-dimensional (2-D) frequency transforms directly in log-polar coordinates. In the present work, we show that is possible to achieve full-frame image de-blur at frame rate on a standard “PC” platform, using these methods. We illustrate this idea with aWiener filter based restoration technique. The main contribution of this note is the implementation of (space-variant) image de-blur directly in log-polar coordinates, using the exponential chirp transform. The results show reasonable quality of de-blur, and suggest that these methods are relevant to applications in mobile image processing platforms in which real-time motion deblur is important, and for which it is not desirable to use extensive or custom fabricated hardware.